Editor’s Letter

And the Brands Played On

It is a fairly time-and-tabloid-tested theory that those at the pinnacle of their fields generally follow one of two distinct behavioral paths. Those in the first group think they operate in a success bubble and are therefore immune to the conventional rules of business or polite society, or both. Those in the other segment live in abject fear that it’s all going to come crashing down at some point unless they work like mad and keep to the straight and narrow, business-wise and otherwise. Companies or individuals in both groups should be ever mindful that it’s a lot more painful falling from the top of the ladder than from a middle rung. For those at the top, those with the global names, or “brands,” as they are now called, the past few months have been a rough patch.

First and foremost, there is “the best brand on Earth: the Obama brand,” as White House social secretary Desirée Rogers referred to her boss in an interview with the Wall Street Journal magazine WSJ last spring. Rogers now has a “former” appended to her own brand name, following the gate-crasher incidents at the Obamas’ first White House state dinner. Not to be overly picky, but there were also typos on the menu that night—which is precisely the sort of error that journalists who cover these sorts of affairs get all up in arms about. Brand Obama may be popular in Oslo, but here at home his approval ratings have slid, from 69 percent in a Gallup poll taken the month he was sworn in to less than 50 percent more than a year later. That’s a lot better than the public’s opinion of Congress, but nothing to write home to Chicago about.

It wasn’t going to take much for Republicans to begin looking over the president’s shoulder once he stumbled, but the sense of disappointment among his Democratic supporters is growing. Many feel that he took a wrong turn right from the beginning on the domestic front, i.e., that rather than work on the economy, jobs, and bringing the nation’s rogue banking system to heel, Obama stuck his hand in the same woodchipper (universal health care) that Clinton did during his first term, and expected a different result. In trying to bring affordable health care to all Americans, Obama was going for the history books more than for the 24-hour news cycle. And there was something admirable in that. But here’s the thing about America and universal health care: unlike in other Western democracies, not all of its citizens want it.

My guess is that the president is a slider—that is, someone who slides through life. When you’re that good, that handsome, that educated, the world in your adulthood is your oyster. I recall executives of an NGO saying that when he came to see them, prior to the election, he was sincere and charming but completely unversed in their mission and goals. My guess is that he’s like a clever student who writes well and figures he can bull his way through an assignment for which he hasn’t really done the dogged groundwork. “Cool,” “cocky,” and “unprepared” are words being attached to Brand Obama—and these are by his supporters. How else can you explain the fact that the opposition to universal health care was able to inject the term “death panels” into the conversation so quickly? The administration overreached and underprepared. His predecessor fell into the same trap following re-election, in 2004—by the narrowest margin for a sitting president since 1916—when he announced the day after the election, “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style.” Well, we all know how his next four years panned out.

Think of the beleaguered overseers of the Toyota brand—what a devil of a year they’ve had. From 2005—when it made more money than all U.S. automakers combined—to 2010, Toyota placed in the Top 10 of Fortune magazine’s “World’s Most Admired Companies,” the only foreign brand to do so. Just two years ago it became the largest car manufacturer in the world, passing G.M., which had held the title since grabbing it away from Ford, in 1931. Toyota well earned its enviable reputation for making quality cars—and make no mistake about it: Toyota builds great cars. Then 2010 happened. In January, after years of complaints about mechanical problems with gas pedals that could cause unintended acceleration, the automaker was forced to recall 2.3 million vehicles.

It wasn’t so much that there were mechanical issues—although that was bad enough—it was that the company reportedly brushed off the complaints, saying that the trouble was caused by the pedals’ getting lodged under floor mats. Congressional hearings, weak apologies, insufficient bowing, a further recall of 400,000 Prius and Lexus hybrids worldwide for problems with their anti-lock braking systems, and the company’s vaunted reputation, which it had built up over the decades, was tarnished. Auto-industry analysts chalked the misfortune up to corporate inflexibility, a reluctance to hear or pass along bad news, and an inability to listen to complaints—some of the same charges being leveled at the Obama White House.

Goldman Sachs, long Wall Street’s gold standard among investment banks, has similarly seen its remarkable reputation suffer, despite doing “God’s work,” as C.E.O. Lloyd Blankfein told the London Sunday Times. (I am convinced he said it in jest. But still.) Each week brings fresh criticisms, whether aimed at the $16.2 billion in compensation Goldman paid out last year or at the fees it has collected for selling off pieces of A.I.G.—an especially damaging bit of news, coming as it did on the heels of reports that Goldman received a hundred cents on the dollar for the billions it was owed by A.I.G. after the government’s $182 billion bailout of the insurance giant. The capper to all this public-relations misery was the revelation that the firm had helped the Greek government hide the extent of its budget deficit so that it could meet the criteria for adopting the euro. That little mess—Der Spiegel called it “blatant balance sheet cosmetics”—has caused Goldman to run afoul of not only Fed chief Ben Bernanke but, worse, Germany’s iron chancellor, Angela Merkel.

And then there is the seismic case of Tiger Woods, the most lucrative personal brand in sports. When the girls began tumbling onto the pages of newspapers following that club-swinging incident last Thanksgiving, his approval ratings—especially among women—plunged. Woods made a number of mistakes—or dozens, if you treat each of his quote-unquote conquests as a separate error. Living in his success bubble, he was a golf superstar during the day who caroused like a basketball star at night—that was his first mistake. His second mistake was that he had never bothered to create a reservoir of goodwill around him, and as a result, sports journalists and even other players on the pro golf circuit were quick to jump on his arrogance and sense of entitlement.

When Woods stood up in February before a carefully selected audience—his mother, his representatives, and a sprinkling of friendly reporters—to apologize for his extramarital girlathon, he spoke for nearly 15 minutes, but left the viewing public deeply dissatisfied. V.F. contributing editor Mark Seal set out to fill in the blanks in Woods’s speech. In his report, “The Temptation of Tiger Woods,” Seal interviews (and Mark Seliger photographs) four of the women who played key roles in Woods’s tumble from grace. Seal also discovered that sex was not Woods’s only sideline preoccupation. He was a committed high roller, or whale, at Las Vegas’s most exclusive casinos, often in the company of retired basketball greats Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley, the latter of whom, you will remember, publicly stated years ago that he was not “a role model.”

Few who lived in the public eye have had an afterlife as charmed as Grace Kelly, whose story, almost always called a “fairy tale,” has affected so many people over so many generations. She made only 11 movies, but 8 of them were beauts: Dial M for Murder, To Catch a Thief, The Bridges at Toko-Ri, High Noon, The Country Girl, Rear Window, High Society, and Mogambo. And yet Kelly was known as much for her inimitable style as for her films or later status as a princess. You could say she and her accoutrements were nothing without each other.

This month, London’s Victoria and Albert Museum will open the doors to a new exhibition, “Grace Kelly: Style Icon,” tracing the citizen princess’s wardrobe evolution through the years. Van Cleef & Arpels, the venerated jeweler, is sponsoring the look back at its late muse; in the winter before she married Prince Rainier, he bestowed on his future princess a necklace of pearls and diamonds from the house as an engagement gift. V.F. contributing editor Laura Jacobs—who has profiled figures as beloved as Julia Child and Emily Post, as well as fashion institutions as rarefied as Hermès, which named its Kelly bag in Grace’s honor—gives us an exquisite portrait of the actress in “Grace Kelly’s Forever Look.” Her life was darker at the seams than her adoring public could have guessed, and Jacobs’s delicate portrait paints the woman in a human light that I think will allow a new generation to celebrate her.

New York’s Metropolitan Opera made rare global headlines last fall when it shoved aside its warhorse production of Tosca, directed by Franco Zeffirelli, in favor of a new, avant-garde version, a production which drew choruses of loud boos on opening night. With the catcalls still echoing, contributing editor Nina Munk took a hard look at the world’s greatest opera company and found an institution both troubled and thriving. Munk delved into the Met’s finances, byways, and history, and spoke at length with everyone from the carpenters and choristers to conductor James Levine and Peter Gelb, the Met’s controversial general manager, whose four-year tenure has been marked by political battles, grumbling among traditionalists, and a $47 million deficit.

With a mission to re-invigorate the art form and draw a more youthful audience, Gelb has brought in new directors and operas, opened rehearsals to the public for free—a very popular move—and initiated high-definition transmissions of live performances to movie theaters around the world. So far, that part of his agenda seems to be working: both attendance and donations—the Met’s economic lifeblood—are on the rise. But where some see a visionary, others see a profligate spender of both capital and tradition—and anyone who can read a balance sheet (few are better at that than Munk) realizes the Met’s finances are impossible even in the best of circumstances, let alone during a crippling recession. All in all, it’s a fascinating, complex story, with a fascinating, complex man at the center of it.

Bruce Wasserstein, the C.E.O. of Lazard, who died unexpectedly of heart failure in October at the age of 61, was arguably the pre-eminent mergers-and-acquisitions banker of our time, and he was nothing if not emblematic of his generation on Wall Street. With an outsize personality and a passion for negotiating both friends and foes into the ground, he let nothing stop him from getting the deals done. At his memorial service, at New York’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, he was praised effusively by the likes of iconic Washington lawyer Vernon Jordan and deal-maker Marty Lipton, and his friends and family have sought to secure his legacy as a business genius who brought out the best in people he mentored, even as he amassed a personal fortune of $2.2 billion. Many also admire how he reached out to his seven-year-old niece, Lucy Jane, after his sister the playwright Wendy Wasserstein died of lymphoma in 2006 at the age of 55.

But some who praise Wasserstein publicly were reticent to go on the record with William D. Cohan for his story “Bruce Wasserstein’s Last Surprise.” And it’s clear from Cohan’s reporting that Wasserstein has plenty of detractors. They paint him as a selfish and insensitive man who collected high fees while guiding clients into deals that played out to their detriment. Cohan’s sources were disturbed also by Wasserstein’s messy personal life. They suspect he moved to London for a year to avoid as much as $75 million in New York city and state capital-gains taxes after the sale of his firm, Wasserstein Perella, to a German bank, in 2001. Some of his colleagues at Lazard, where he worked for the last decade of his life, are harsh in their criticism of the way he enriched himself at their and the shareholders’ expense while providing questionable value to the firm—and even being a liability on occasion. It was clear to them that Wasserstein had been struggling with health problems for some time, but no one really knew what exactly was causing them. Believing himself to be a kind of Nietzschean Übermensch, Wasserstein was not the kind of person to admit his weaknesses or even his mortality—yet another fascinating case study of a leader among the banking and financial crowd that has shaped our current realities.

In this age of 24-7 headlines, the term “newsweekly” seems almost quaint. That’s why “The Time of Their Lives,” Alan Brinkley’s report on the birth of Time magazine—where I began in New York in the 1970s—is such a compelling slice of history. Brinkley is an esteemed historian who won the 1983 National Book Award for Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression; he is also the son of the longtime NBC anchor David Brinkley. (They are no relation to V.F. contributor Douglas Brinkley, the presidential scholar.) As Alan Brinkley tells it, two decades ago former J.F.K. adviser Arthur Schlesinger Jr. urged him to consider writing a book about the publishing titan Henry Luce, the brash and ambitious son of missionaries (and husband of former Vanity Fair managing editor Clare Boothe Luce), who created not only Time, Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated, but also the first global media brand, Time Incorporated. Brinkley, until recently the provost of Columbia University, eventually spent a dozen years researching and writing his epic, gaining access to previously sequestered archives—most crucially, Luce’s rarely glimpsed correspondence with his parents and his first serious girlfriend.

In the 1920s, the decade that brought us radio and the talkies (not to mention the heyday of the Jazz Age Vanity Fair), busy middle-class Americans flocked to Time, a new type of periodical that, starting with its inaugural issue of March 3, 1923, synthesized all of the week’s news in a concise 28 pages. To anyone interested in the nuts and bolts of journalism, it is sheer delight to read this excerpt from The Publisher, in which Brinkley describes the genesis of the newsmagazine: the germ of the idea, the struggle to raise funds, the all-night session as that first issue came off the presses (blanketing the staff and their fried-egg sandwiches in printer’s ink). Brinkley’s tale is also, in hindsight, a bittersweet saga, what with today’s digital delivery of information having turned publications that provide weekly news into something of an old-world breed. Yet another global brand struggling in these times.

Graydon Carter is the editor of Vanity Fair. His books include What We’ve Lost (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and Oscar Night: 75 Years of Hollywood Parties (Knopf).